News: March 2013

If we are to sustain fish as a global food source, then fisheries and conservation managers need to take account of new evidence showing how overfishing of the larger fish in a population actually changes the gene pool in favour of smaller less fertile fish.

A paper in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment (available online from 18.3.13) led by fish geneticists at Bangor University, with contributions from the University of East Anglia, the University of the West Indies and the Max-Planck-Institute for Developmental Biology, has proved for the first time that the change towards smaller fish takes place at the DNA level, and within a relatively short time period of a few generations.